Any Expereinced Shuttle Users?

[StuG]

I'm kinda looking for the overall quality of how Shuttle is. Alot of reviews I have found on the internet give me mixed feelings about their quality control and overall unit construction. The particular unit I am interested in is below:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6856101083

This would be turned into a mild game server/other stuff server, running a Phenom II 905e or Phenom II 705e so heat SHOULDN'T be an issue, but granted I don't know much about shuttle. Thanks for any input you guys can give me.

[dragmor]

I've built maybe 20 shuttles over the last 5-6 years and not had one failure, all of them are still running as far as I know.

The one problem I had was about 3 years ago but it was a bad batch of SATA cables that got included in the boxes. $2 later and the problem was fixed.

[StuG]

That's good to know! Since you seem to have some experience with them, where do they tend to fall on the "loudness" scale. Are they loud? Silent? Stuff like that would also be helpful. Also, did you find the cramped cases hard to work in?

[dragmor]

They are as loud as a normal case, althought you tend to notice them more because they normally sit on the desk rather than below it. Vista SPCR and pick silent components. The inbuilt case fan and PSU fan are pretty quite under normal conditions. The machine in my sig is good up to about 35c ambient and then the case fan has to come off its lowest setting. Your choice of GPU will be the biggest factor with noise and then harddisk.

I wouldn't worry about an e series CPU, just get a normal 95w one. The idle isn't that much different (2-3w) and if you want you can easily undervolt it. The PSUs in shuttles are pretty good, I've setup some surprising rigs on their 250w units (overclocked C2D 3.2ghz, 8800gt, 2xHD, 1xDVD). Also I prefer the G case of the P case.

As for working in the case, I much prefer it to a normal case. They are just well designed. The whole drive bay is removeable which basically leaves you working in a metal cage with most of the cables are already routed for you. I'd much rather work in a shuttle than a P180 and I've done several of both.

[etilena]

just note that the fans get noisy after a while. shuttles start off quite silent then after a year or so, the case fan gets a little more audible.

[StuG]

Awesome, great feedback! Well the one that I have picked out is a G series, and I plan on just using the integrated Graphics since its just going to be a home/game server. Though its nice to have an upgrade path in case I decide to switch it over to a HTPC or something like that. Do you think its noisy enough to spend the money on expensive silents fans? And I presume the noise over time thing is probably from low-quality bearings

[glacius555]

I had one in the old Pentium 4 and Intel 915P chipset days, and I must say that it was never noisy enough to bother, actually it was the most silent PC I ever owned. You should also know that I kept it under the desk.. I think you're good to go with what it has, I can't remember whether I had a possibility to tweak the PSU and case fan in the BIOS, but I could silence the CPU fan with temperature settings in the BIOS. THey might've included those settings after so many years Just make sure that you install the heatsink properly!